A day in the life of Andrew Fryer

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taupo seaplaneHello I am a technical evangelist and you’ll get an idea of what one of those is as I run through a typical day of mine (actually last Thursday). 

I have been on leave in New Zealand and I still haven’t quite got back on UK time so I am up at 4:30am putting the final touches to a talk I am doing at 11:30 EduGeeks a community of IT guys working in schools. The subject is sneak peaks and I have 45 minutes to wow them with some of the cool stuff coming out of our labs and Microsoft Research. I am happy with the deck and after a quick breakfast with Mrs Fryer I get my news from Today on Radio 4 on the way into TVP for 7am.

It’s deserted at this time of the day and so I have some peace to plan my day and peace on the roads to get here. Actually I only come in when I am needed to save time and carbon and also because I have cameras, and my drawing board at home to do creative stuff (more on that later), and Lync keeps me in the loop when I am not there.

Being on the edge of technology and having a large following has many benefits, the latest being that my good friends at Dell have given me a couple of cool machines to use:

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  • on the right, a Dell XT2 multi-touch tablet laptop for my day to day work. It’s quiet fast and has all the connectivity I need to add devices read SD cards etc. and isn’t too heavy.
  • on the left is a a Dell M6500 (aka ‘Covet’) which is a bright orange monster machine with three SSD, 16Gb RAM and an Intel i7 processor which I got yesterday. I am going to use this to have a mini data centre on hand to take to events where I can’t rely on the connection back to our Microsoft Technology Centre where we have a full private cloud I can show. 

So also on today’s agenda is to make some screen casts showing how I will set the Dell Covet up and as sp1 of Windows server 2008 R2 has now been released I can also create some content on what that looks like. To make screencasts I generally use TechSmith Camtasia (6.5) as it is dead easy to use and creates really small files.

OK it’s time to go down and start the EduGeek day, I notice on Twitter (I use MetroTwit) that some of the guys are already here so I put on my lab coat and meet and great. For me the best part of my day is exchanging ideas and stories with the IT Pro community and I reckon those of those working in schools have got the toughest and possibly the most rewarding jobs in IT.

The event is over and now I have a couple of meetings:

  • The TechNet team are deep into planning Techdays which happens w/c 23rd May in Fulham and today I need to hook up with Claire Smyth who runs the MVP (Microsoft Valued Professional) program in the UK as we want to involve these experts in the event to help us to make the event even more interesting and interactive. I am working on the Private Cloud Day and the one for AppPlat and this means trying to find interesting speakers, reviewing and approving the content which is the key to the success of the event.
  • My last meeting of the day is with Eric on the ISV team wants me to create a cartoon strip for a projects he’s working on so I’ll get the brief and work that up at home tomorrow and it’s good to know that my parents didn’t waste their money sending me to art college!

That done I’m off home. After a quick power nap, and half an hour jumping around on Kinect I get out a post on the #Edugeek event and keep an eye on the tweets.

So a packed day; they aren’t all this manic but the constant change and variety is what keeps me interested and why I believe I have one of the best jobs at Microsoft